The Inventor Read online

  … The war for Christ is a territorial war. The “territory” is the human mind. The more completely captured in its raw state, the sooner it can be led to embrace our sacred doctrines and, in turn, programmed to help spread it. Once the mind has been breached, the “political animal” is defeated; God triumphs and the Church can recapture the leadership and hegemony it once exercised in shaping the World in the Catholic tradition.

  … In order to obtain optimal results, Christ’s Soldiers must be among the most devout and obedient Catholics. They must be highly motivated. They must clearly understand the solemn nature and grave consequences of their obligation, and they must steadfastly justify their actions if unmasked or challenged. Sworn to secrecy, under no less a penalty than excommunication and spiritual death, they must be willing to suffer the vicissitudes and discomforts associated with our Holy Struggle, our war against infidels, and they must endure the animosity their mission will engender until we rise victorious.

  … Well established citizens -- doctors, attorneys, business tycoons, teachers, journalists, and community leaders, all God-fearing, pious, church-going Catholics, shall be considered prime candidates for recruitment.

  … When their participation in what inevitably will appear to be a covert operation is revealed to them they must be eager to proceed and infiltrate their social and professional circles.

  … They will in turn receive instruction in techniques of persuasion and control of target individuals and groups. Awareness of and dedication to our noble struggle will be reinforced by –-

  Keeping the recruits highly motivated and inspired;

  Encouraging the support of segments of society for an insurrection against heresy and for the overthrow and reconstruction of our current system of governance;

  Impressing upon them that defeat will result in the adulteration and death of true Christianity, and in persecution;

  Campaigning against avant-garde clergy, especially those who preach Liberation Theology, support the ordination of women to the priesthood, advocate the repeal of celibacy and endorse abortion, stem cell research and same-sex unions.

  … Conscription will be carried out with due diligence in private consultations with recruiters who do not initially reveal their true identity. Recruits will then be informed that they are already inside the movement and that a change of heart is futile and carries severe penalties.

  … Once trained, this legion of Christian soldiers will be charged with infiltrating unions, student groups, peasant organizations, school districts and regional legislative bodies.

  In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

  If the verbiage gives off a strange odor of sulfur it’s because it brazenly and tackily plagiarizes a clandestine and rather crude CIA training manual, Psychological Operations in Counterinsurgency Warfare, which was distributed in Nicaragua in the 80s by attaching clusters to balloons and floating them down into the countryside. Drafted in Spanish, the 90-page manual advised U.S.-backed Contra rebels to “kidnap and neutralize selected Nicaraguan government officials,” a directive interpreted by Contra leaders to include assassination. It also suggested blackmailing Nicaraguan citizens into joining the rebel cause.

  On February 5, 1984, the House Intelligence Committee concluded that production of the manual by the CIA violated a 1982 law that forbids U.S. personnel from taking part in the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. Printed in Honduras, about 2,000 copies were distributed in 1983 to guerrillas of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the largest CIA-funded rebel force. Those attached to balloons were part of a 3,000-booklet edition cheaply printed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Predictably, the House Intelligence Committee’s ruling did not thwart future U.S. political, military and economic forays in Central America or, for that matter, elsewhere around the globe, all spearheaded by the CIA, which American author, Trevor Paglen, characterizes as

  “an agency designed to operate outside the law … free to pursue its vision of a new world, to create new geographies, and to keep that world’s details far from the public record.”

  At odds with the modern world, Father Hubert believes that Catholic activists have too often struggled between their faith and the misguided or wavering convictions of the flock. Perhaps the enactment of a Catholic sharia (modeled after Islam’s “divine” law) could greatly ease the Army of Christ’s awesome task. Perhaps such sharia could also include a fatwa, or decree, that sanctions, in the name of the Lord, the formation of death squads charged with the ritual execution of heretics and apostates. Spurning the lessons of history, trembling with sacramental fervor, Hubert François de Ravaillac, the descendant of Huguenot King Henry IV’s assassin will be ready if called. After all, he was named in honor of Saint Hubert, the patron saint of hunters.

  Letter from Rotterdam

  Late on the afternoon of October 2, 2008, the phone chimes in the cluttered riverfront office of Michel Montvert, director of the Institute of Symbolic and Hermetic Arts in Paris. On the line is Dr. Manuel Albeniz, a colleague and specialist in Medieval history in Madrid.

  “I received a letter this morning from a certain Jan van den Haag. Did you?” Albeniz asks in heavily accented French.

  “I don’t know. Why.”

  “His signature is followed by a CC addressed to you.”

  “Let me look.”

  Montvert, a tall, angular, graying man, leans across his desk. The in-box brims with sheaves of documents and unopened mail. He finds the envelope. Peering at the tight, florid script in which his name and address are inscribed, he turns around, leans back in his high-winged leather chair and stretches his feet on the credenza. Through the window, across the slate-colored Seine, the filigreed spires of the Sainte-Chapelle shimmer in the pale pastel colors of dusk. Frozen in time, stupor or lethargy or anguish etched on their granite faces, winged and serpent-like, their shadows stretching over the battlements, gargoyles fix vacant but ever-watchful eyes on the city below.

  “I found it.”

  “Will you have a chance to read it soon?”

  “I doubt it. I’ve been swamped. I’m exhausted. Yesterday I gave a lecture on Frida Kahlo at the Musée d’Orsay. This morning we had a retrospective of the late Jules Perahim’s work. The Bauhaus Museum in Berlin has invited me to address a symposium. I’m flying out tonight. I’ll try to read it on the plane.”

  “Do that,” Albeniz presses with some urgency. “You’ll find it … intriguing. Let me hear from you when you get back.”

  “De acuerdo. Hasta pronto, hermano.” Deep in thought, Montvert lets out a wearied sigh, fans himself distractedly with the envelope, and stows it in his breast pocket.

  In his office at the El Prado Museum, Albeniz, an older man with a high forehead and a lion-like mane of silvery hair, rereads the missive. He frowns, and shakes his head. Grimace turns to grin, grin to sneer.

  “Nah, debe ser una broma.” Must be a joke. There’s more hope than certitude in this assessment. Something in Jan van den Haag’s language, in the elegance of his syntax, in his carefully articulated esotericism and allusions reveals broad scholarship and implies initiation into and familiarity with the symbolism and objectives of Freemasonry. His entreaty has the resonance of truth. Most enticing are the data he promises to share in future communications, should Albeniz and Montvert express serious interest.

  That evening, as the Airbus that carries Montvert to Berlin descends toward Tempelhof Airport, Albeniz heads to La Escudilla Restaurant, in the Barrio de Trafalgar, for a late supper. He eats absent-mindedly struggling to reconcile history, art, human nature and the politics of discretion.

  In his room at the venerable Hotel de Rome on Bebelplatz, off the lime-tree-lined Unter den Linden in the German capital, Montvert reviews his notes for the next day’s symposium. He remembers van den Haag’s letter, still resting in the breast pocket of his jacket. He walks to the closet, retrieves it and stretches on the king-sized bed. Once again, he studies the exquisite p
enmanship, the stamp, the postmark. He wearily tears the envelope open and removes a sheet of buff-hued paper bearing an impeccably symmetrical italic hand-written message.

  P.O.B 3579, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

  30 September 2008

  Dear Monsieur Montvert,

  We share similar interests, political leanings and metaphysical ideals, many of them embodied in the Regius Poem and later reaffirmed in Anderson’s Constitution. You and I are also heir to the same wanderings and tribulations that have darkened the pages of history. It is in that spirit that I write.

  I am the direct and last descendant of a legendary artist whose name I cannot reveal at this time. In my possession is a manuscript this early freethinker penned shortly before he died. A codicil stipulates that it will not be opened and circulated until five hundred years after his death. The document has been safeguarded by my family over the centuries and his injunction was scrupulously respected –- until now. Old, unmarried and childless, unsure I will reach the year 2016, when the contents of my ancestor’s revelations can be made public, guilt-ridden but consumed with curiosity, I broke the wax seal and perused an extraordinary compendium of insights and affirmations about his work, personal convictions and the perils of whimsy -- or grotesque realism -- in an age of austere literalism. What I read has left me shaken, enthralled, confused and apprehensive.

  Your reputation and that of Señor Albeniz in the world of art and art history are unrivaled. So is your untiring patronage of Surrealism, primitive and contemporary, as are Señor Albeniz’s grasp of inter-doctrinal affairs and expertise on the rift that continues to divide the Church and the secular world.

  My forebear’s musings, I believe, need to be made public, studied and deliberated. The airing of this startling document can only be entrusted to a professional, someone whose character, eminence and authority command attention, someone who can stand firm against the firestorm of controversy, perhaps of rancor, that my ancestor’s final words are apt to ignite.

  If you wish to learn more and, having done so, can pledge your willingness to shepherd what will surely result in a scandal of sizable magnitude, please write. If not, I apologize for the intrusion with every assurance that I shall bear you not a trace of ill will.

  Respectfully and Fraternally,

  Jan Henryk van den Haag.

  CC. Dr. Manuel Albeniz

  Van den Haag’s ornate signature ends with three dots forming an equilateral triangle.

  In his luxurious quarters at the papal apartments, Pope Benedict XVI consults with the second most powerful man in the Catholic Church hierarchy, his successor and trusted Inquisitor, the hard-nosed Cardinal William Joseph Levada. The in-camera tête-à-tête focuses on two matters. The first concerns a projected trip by the pontiff to the Middle East, where he will try to mend fences with Jews and Muslims. The second explores new strategies aimed at hardening the Church’s stance on Freemasonry, more specifically the official branding of Catholics who join Masonic lodges as heretics guilty of a mortal sin.

  As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctirne of the Faith, then pope-in-training, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger earned a reputation as a hard-line enforcer of Catholic doctrinal absolutism. After heaping syrupy praise on René Descartes, the 17th century French rationalist philosopher, Ratzinger abruptly suspended his homage by condemning Descartes and forbidding Catholics to read his books “on pain of sin.” He condemned Liberation Theology, the oxygen-rich ministry that redefines and, for the poor and voiceless, enlivens an otherwise stolid Roman Catholicism, and he punished its disciples with public humiliations, swift and irrevocable defrocking, and summary excommunications. He also excoriated and suppressed neo-liberal theologians and delivered hostile orations against abortion, homo-sexuality and the ordination of women to the priesthood.

  When Benedict ascended to the Papacy his election was halfheartedly welcomed by some Jewish groups (one of them the right-wing and very accommodating Anti-Defamation League, which is more interested in ingratiating itself with the Vatican than in rehashing history). He received a more tepid welcome from world Jewry which hoped that Benedict would “continue along the path of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II in supporting the State of Israel and committing to an uncompromising fight against anti-Semitism.”

  Critics accuse Benedict's papacy of being insensitive towards Judaism. They cite the expanding use of the Tridentine Mass, which calls for the conversion of Jews to Christianity, and denounce the reinstatement of four excommunicated bishops, all members of the Society of St. Pius X, a traditionalist and virulently anti-Semitic Catholic organization. One of these bishops is American Richard Williamson, an outspoken Holocaust denier who struggled to issue a skewed apology but did not recant his position on the well documented event.

  Pope Benedict's dealings with Islam -- 1.2 billion-strong and growing at about three percent per year -- remain, at best, strained. On September 12, 2006 the pontiff delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where he had served as professor of theology. Entitled “Faith, Reason and the University -- Memories and Reflections,” the lecture received critical attention from political and religious authorities. Muslim politicians and religious leaders recoiled at his pompous insensitivity and protested against what they perceived to be inflammatory rhetoric and an odious mischaracterization of Islam. They were especially offended by the following statement:

  “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

  The pope said nothing about the Crusades, the “Holy” Inquisition and the “Conquest” of the Americas, which, in addition to fattening the Church’s bulging treasury, were waged to spread Christianity … by the sword.

  Other pontifical gaffes would follow, all dramatic evidence of a Church woefully out of touch with reality, to say nothing of how prone it is to tinker with history. On his first visit overseas, Benedict told a gathering of Latin American bishops in Brazil that preaching Jesus and his gospel did not intrude upon or corrupt pre-Columbian cultures. This callous falsehood triggered a storm of indignation, prompting the Vatican to issue a hasty but unconvincing “clarification,” not a Mea Culpa. Instead of expressing regret for the evils of colonialism and forced conversions, the clarification indemnified the modern Church by disingenuously claiming that it in no way condones the excesses of the past.

  When Benedict was elected pope, one of his first and perhaps most surprising supporters was PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). PETA expediently or naïvely portrays Jesus as a vegetarian, which he may have been when he was not eating fish, but in whose honor the ritual of Holy Communion turns his followers into cannibals. The pontiff’s passion for traditional papal garb, especially gold-embroidered ermine-trimmed vestments, once a royal entitlement, prompted animal lovers everywhere to ask Benedict to live up to his words and give fur a rest. No one knows for sure whether such mundane petition had any effect on papal prerogative.

  Distancing himself yet again from actuality, bent on taking the Church back to its darkest days, Benedict, on his first trip to Africa, a continent where at least 25 million people are infected with HIV, told the gathered masses that condoms are not only useless in the prevention of AIDS but that they may actually aggravate the problem. The “cruel epidemic,” he insisted, should be tackled through “fidelity and abstention.” Reckless faith, or depraved cynicism still prevents the pope from grasping the enormity of his counsel. Pro-life -- the protoplasmic kind -- but indifferent to the dignity of man, his outrageous directive condemns millions to an early, agonizing death.

  Tired, facing a busy schedule, Montvert surrenders to fitful, dream-haunted sleep. In the morning he will be speaking about the great Kandinsky, one of the most important innovators in modern art. The painter’s abstract, obsessively geometric, brightly colored canvases of incredible sensorial richness coalesce and break apart in a kaleidosco
pe of Montvert’s own nightmare-induced creation. Further along in the dream, he enters the Bauhaus, the legendary German art and architecture school from which so many modernists would emerge. Suddenly, the edifice crumbles around him, as it did figuratively in 1933 when the Nazis, fearing the “un-German” (Jewish) influence of social liberals and the impact of “degenerate art” on the pristine Teutonic psyche, shut its doors for the remainder of the war.

  This is no longer Joseph Goebbels’ domain but Montvert has yet to feel at ease in Germany. His discomfort is visceral. Germans may have collectively expiated the sins of their fathers but there is something about their country that he finds troubling -- the language, clipped, guttural, brusque, imperious -- the frosty aloofness, the uniforms, the mannerisms, the formalistic infatuation with “discipline” and “order,” the reemergence of Nazi cells, the transparent nostalgia for the Third Reich’s brief but intoxicating rapture. All hark back to a time, not so very long ago, when Germans enthusiastically goose-stepped to Hitler’s drumbeat. Even in his sleep, Montvert can’t wait to clear off.

  Albeniz, an insomniac, walks home as Madrid’s other self, iridescent and roguish, comes to life in the late evening hours. Lost in thought, brooding over Jan van den Haag’s baffling letter, he turns to another time when darkness reigned, when blindness to man’s inhumanity and deafness to reason were self-inflicted attitudes, not congenital infirmities. Somewhere in the distance church bells strike eleven.

  “We have learned nothing,” he says to himself as he unlocks his apartment door and retires for the night.